Other notable interests of mine include music (I sing and play classical and jazz piano), Go (an amazing, ancient board game which you can read about here), bridge, Linux and ancient Greek, among others.

In addition to The Math Less Traveled, I also maintain another blog aimed more at an audience of peers (although anyone is welcome to read it, of course). There you’ll find musings on mathematics, programming (especially Haskell), and academia.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions for me, suggestions or ideas for this blog, or just want to chat. To find my e-mail address, start with the following and “subtract one” from each letter (for example, you should change the first “c” into a “b”, and so on). There will still be one incorrect letter but it will be obvious what you should correct it to.

Wonderful blog! I shall look forward to reading this and your other blog regularly.

I would like to correspond with you, in due course, about “practical means to show people the beauty, poetry and power of math (in addition to excellent things like your blog)”: for this purpose I’d like to send you information about the ‘One Page Management System’ (OPMS), a generic aid to problem solving and decision making based on the seminal contributions to systems science from Professor John N. Warfield. This material would consist of PowerPoint presentations and Word documents (about 1.5-2 MB in size should be OK to give you a good idea about OPMS and its potential for the above purpose. – Do please let me know if I may send you this material.

Hi Brent
congrats, your ‘tone’ made it on one of the big German news pages[1]. Myself, I am far from math away, especially proofing. I went on to your aboutme page and spotted Haskell. That’s what I’m interested in because it was part of my Bachelor thesis – I am a business informatics/ information systems guy. I know, Haskell is still a niche. However, it’s great for quick coding without thinking too much. My question, in which fields do you deploy Haskell. And don’t tell me ‘math’😉

Hi Lukas, hehe, wow, I have never heard anyone say that Haskell is “great for quick coding without thinking too much”! Usually people complain that it involves too much thinking. =) I use it for my research in programming languages, of course, but I also use it for things like creating vector graphics (see http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams — I also used Haskell to make that web site). Just a quick glance over http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ will show you the broad range of fields in which people use Haskell.

Well, I simply *use* Haskell – means using ‘what is already provided’ – instead of digging too deep in spheres like monad programming. Indeed, entry barriers are high, especially when you previously have been familiar only with imperative and/or object-orientated languages. However, if you leave that behind, it’s fun to program ‘basic’ stuff in Haskell – despite awful compiler error message😉
I get your point, though. Once I tried to understand the xmonad code… but that’s another story.

Thanks for the minus times minus = positive posting Brent, really helped think how I was going to teach it to my top eleven-year olds in England! Think I shall physically use the numberline to show the ‘switching’ of counting!

Dear Brent,
As a proponent of math education in the United States, we need your help to promote our nationwide math competition by blogging or posting about it on your blog/forum.

As you probably already know, despite the fact that the US spends the most money on education per capita, our students are ranked 25th globally for math proficiency. The MATHCOUNTS Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to improving that statistic. MATHCOUNTS’ third annual “ Math Video Challenge” is a math competition for 6th to 8th graders that encourages student innovation as they create and star in their own math videos, thus exciting them to pursue higher education in math.

As the webmaster of The Math Less Traveled, we are asking you to help support this effort by mentioning us in your next blog or forum post or promoting our logo with a link to the site. So far this contest has gathered over 500
submissions and millions of views on the videos. Our goal this year is this year is to do even better. With your help, we are confident we will reach this goal.

For more information on MATHCOUNTS or the Math Video Challenge, visit our webpages at mathcounts.org and videochallenge.mathcounts.org/math-camera-action.

Teaching myself about Hybrid Digital Broadcasting some of the math I haven’t experienced. Your site is a god sent as I need a clear explanation. I am a self learner and your site is very helpful. Already I looked up summations ( found a very clear explanation ) I will definitely bookmark this site